Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Kennzeichen: Atheismus - Theater (Satre); der Mensch ohne Wesen (Natur) - Absurdität; Freiheit als Selbst-Setzung; absolute Autonomie; der Fehl Gottes

Kurzinhalt: Man is not an essence; that is, in the depths of him there is no intelligibility, no structure of meaning. Man has no nature; that is...; In the face of the world's absurdity, man's original choice is to be-for-himself...

Textausschnitt: 113b It is much more difficult to characterize the second type of post-modern atheism represented by the new man of the Theater. He has come upon the scene much more recently; therefore his intentions are not so fully manifest. Moreover, one cannot speak of him as one can of the Marxist man, who presents, so to speak, a single face with lineaments that have settled into fixed lines, as happens with a man of some age and maturity who is set on a career. The man of the Theater is many men, all of them individuals, who do not look entirely alike, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to sketch his portrait. The model for him would probably be Jean-Paul Sartre, even though other men of the Theater would disclaim resemblance. In an odd, inverted way, Sartre is a Scholastic. He stands to the prophecy of Nietzsche as the Scholastic stood to the prophecy of the New Testament. The School, headed by Anselm, began with the axiom, "Credo ut intelligam," I believe in order that I may understand. The Scholastic question was, is what faith affirms intelligible? Sartre begins with the myth of the death of God. It is apparently his one article of faith, accepted as true without question. His question then is Scholastic, whether what faith affirms is intelligible. To be exact, I must change a word in the question. The word "intelligible" would doubtless not be intelligible to Sartre. He would not use it; it would not express his intention. He is a Scholastic with a difference. Properly stated, his question is whether what faith affirms, that God is dead, is livable. His intention is to "ex-sist" the death of God, to make to "stand forth" the world out of which God has died, to make a phenomenological description of the man from whom God is absent. In some such terms, the general intention of the man of the Theater, on the model of Sartre, may be stated. The statement needs nuance, which will be supplied, I hope, as I now venture to generalize. (Fs)

114a In the first place, the original ground from which the man of the Theater proceeds is not in the world of ideas but in the world of fact. Before him at the outset is the problem of evil. He sees the world as Camus (himself no Sartre in temper or intention) saw it in L'homme revolte. What he sees is a circumscribed garden surrounded by death, and, beyond death, nothing. Death constantly makes incursions into the garden in the many forms that human death can take. There are the public forms of insensate war and the cruelty of concentration camps, the products of tyranny or folly in politics. There are also the private forms of innocence abused, loyalty betrayed, love soiled, honor traduced, failure, defeat, disease. The man of the Theater views this tragic spectacle not with cynicism but with compassion for man, who stands under such great menace from all sides. His climate of soul is the antithesis of that of the modern man for whom les lumieres shone so brightly. His mind is full of darkness; it is oppressed with a sense of the finitude and fragility of existence; it shivers before the unpredictabilities of history. This post-modern man lives in a climate of anguish and anxiety. (Fs)

115a In the second place, it does not occur to the man of the Theater that he should seek to understand and explain the world of his vision. He simply summons out of his vision the will to freedom. His concept of freedom is complicated and obscure. For our limited purposes here, say that it is man's will to be the "inventor of himself" (in Sartre's phrase). The will is heroic, but not in the old romantic style. The will is that man should recognize the absurdity of the world and that he should also recognize himself to be absurd. Man is not an essence; that is, in the depths of him there is no intelligibility, no structure of meaning. Man has no nature; that is, in the depths of him there is no ordered set of dynamisms out of which he might act with purpose and coherence. As it is with man, so is it with the world-the dramatic human world of history, with which alone the Theater is concerned. Let all this be recognized. Let there be no will to change it. Freedom is not the possibility of changing the world, as with the Marxist. There is no such possibility. The world is darkness, says the Gospel, uttering a stable, transtemporal truth. The world is absurd, says the man of the Theater, translating into sheer enigma what the Gospel understood to be only mystery. (Fs) (notabene)

116a The matrix of the human project is therefore given. And in this situation the radical decision is for freedom. For a man to be free is for him to assume single and full obligation for his own existence. It is for him to bear alone the entire responsibility for being. In the face of the world's absurdity, man's original choice is to be-for-himself. His project is to rescue and recover and realize himself. And this "self" is only a freedom, an absolute autonomy. This is what he intends to invent. This is the only value in an otherwise absurd world. And it is itself an absurdity. Man's project is doomed from the outset to frustration. For a man to be thus free is for him to be God. And this is absurdity squared. It is not only that man cannot be God. It is also that for a man to ex-sist God is for him not to ex-sist; for God does not ex-sist. (Fs) (notabene)

116b In the third place, the man of the Theater adheres to the myth of the death of God, but in his own sense. Unlike his modern predecessors, he has no will to disprove the existence of God. He does not even trouble himself, as they did, with proving that the traditional proofs do not prove. The quadriform medieval problematic-whether God is, what God is, how God is to be known, how God is to be named-has absolutely no meaning whatever for him. His question is biblical, whether God is here, now, with us. And his answer is negative. (Fs) (notabene)

116c To be exact, he does not say that God is dead, for this would be to imply that God once ex-sisted, that he once was-with-us. In one mood, the man of the Theater speaks of God's "missing-ness" (der Fehl Gottes). This is his mood of guilt and fear. The fear is that God may not be missing; perhaps he is only being missed when he is really here. The guilt lies in the feeling that God is missing only because he has been dismissed. In another mood of more firm atheist purpose, however, the man of the Theater says that God is absent. And he says more than this when his post-modern intention is fully fixed. He says that God must be absent. He asserts his fundamental will that God should be absent. The reason is obvious. If God is present in the midst of men, man is dispossessed of the freedom toward which the will of the man of the Theater has set. If God is present, man is being made by God, and he is being made a man, a being with an essence and a nature. Therefore man is not free to make himself ex nihilo, out of a nothingness of nature and essence. If God is present, man's existence, which actualizes an essence, is transformed into a destiny, a destiny which he himself did not choose. A higher power of appointment, vested in the Pantokrator, is brought to bear on man, and under the weight of it his power to invent himself is crushed to nothingness. If God is present, if he is thus engaged as the higher Freedom in man's historical existence, man cannot exist. The living God is the death of man. (Fs) (notabene)

117a Therefore God must be declared dead, missing, absent. The declaration is an act of the will, a basic will to the absence of God. Like the post-modern man in the Marxist tradition, the man of the Theater is fundamentally God-opposed. However, he does not will, with Marx, the suppression of God from history. If he understands history at all, which is not the case, he could not understand it as Marx did. You would more exactly characterize his will if you were to reach for the biblical notion of "forgetting" God and if you were to understand it in a Freudian sense, which is indeed the sense of the Bible. The will of the man of the Theater thus becomes a will to the repression of God from consciousness. His project is to put God out of his conscious mind while God is still in his deep mind. Whatever your theological view of the matter, you must admit that the project entails a serious psychological risk. (Fs)

118a The man of the Theater is, I said, an elusive figure, ill-defined even by himself, resisting definition by anyone else. At least he is a new figure, not to be disregarded even by us here in America. To us he may seem to be an alien figure only because we still live, or think we live, in the modern age and because the problem of evil has hitherto touched this blessed country only lightly. All the more should we attend to him; for there he stands as a judgment on the modern age. After all, the world that he declares to be absurd, the human existence from which he says that God is absent, the freedom of man that he sees as no more than a frustration-all these were the creations of modernity. If he is obsessed with the problem of evil, it is because this ancient problem in a newly complex and visible form was his heritage from modernity. (Fs)